The story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears gets another telling these holidays, this time from Improvisors Kids at Circa Two.  However this production, titled The 3 Bears, is post-Goldilocks and follows the adventures of the three Bears after their home invasion by Goldilocks, who never actually appears in this production. 

On arrival the audience is invited to an open home as the Bears are selling their house and moving on as it doesn’t feel like a home anymore.  And this is where the Improvisors come into their own, in eliciting suggestions from the audience as to what country they should go to and what they should do once they get there. 

They end up going to three different countries, each time one of the Bears then gets suggestions from the audience as to what they could do for a job or hobby. Creating a car from four of the younger members of the audience with another one as a sponge washing the car was one of the many innovative ideas to come forward all of which were lots of fun. 

Eventually the Bears arrive home deciding that there is no place like home.  A simple tale that has the potential for lots of interactive fun, this show seemed much more low key in style and presentation than some of the Improvisors earlier shows but was nevertheless enjoyed by the opening performance audience. 

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This Improvisors’ version of the Three Bears story has almost nothing in common with the KidzStuff production that’s also on in Wellington these hols.  The show at 4 Moncrieff Street tells a scripted story that leads up to the well known episode of Goldilocks breaking into the Bears’ house while at Circa Two it’s all over bar the moving when the show begins. 

Having suffered their home invasion, Baby Bear is trying to fix his broken chair and Mother Bear cannot bear to hear the ‘G’ name, so she and Father Bear have put their house on the market through Big Bad Wolf Real Estate. It’s an Open Home we have arrived at. Children in the audience are prevailed upon to tell us what’s happened – and what ensues is improvised within a basic structure.  

I am at the second performance, where Kenny King is Father, Gareth Ruck is Mother and newcomer Jimmy O’Donovan is Baby Bear. (What a shame there are no women at all in the interchangeable list of six performers.) The music man for every show is Bill Hickman and Uther Dean is on lights.  

A recurring song establishes that they no longer feel safe here and need to leave, and today some of the rhyming of the improvised verses is way below par (must do better). Their destination(s), a job for Dad, a hobby for Mum, a place to go where a lost Baby Bear finds himself, are all suggested en route by small audience members.  

This afternoon their first stop is Italy where Dad become a pizza-maker, thence to Alaska where Mother attempts photography with polar bear audience volunteers, and on to France where Baby Bear ends up in a nursery (the kind with kids, not plants).  

At each stop-off, a situation needs to be created that results in a chase and the need to move on. This makes for quite challenging improv in that in the process of accepting each other’s offers and building on them, a conflict and crisis needs to be fabricated.  This time these sequences sometimes feel a little awkward, as cries of “No, no, no!” verge on blocking (to use the theatresports parlance); or perhaps it’s more accurate to say the scenes lack buoyancy as the actors strive to be agreeably antagonistic.  

Otherwise the trio do well with their random characters. O’Donovan brings a lovely innocence to baby Bear; Ruck excels in commenting on Father Bear’s “big …… paws”; King adds an interesting dimension to the USA’s Alaska by having it policed by Canadian Mounties, impressively mastering that difficult accent in the process.  

It all works out well in the end. Home sweet home is reclaimed and a gift with a message from Goldilocks herself – found in the audience! – ties it all up nicely.  

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